Originally published in the Sunday, February 12th, 2022 edition of the Stabroek News Photo of Akwaeke Emezi Akwaeke Emezi used to intimidate me. They have bounced from genre to genre, storyform to storyform, leaving ground-breaking and provocative work in their wake since their debut novel Freshwater shook the literary world in 2018. Since then, they …
Continue reading Love and Loss Collide in Akwaeke Emezi’s You made a Fool of Death with your Beauty
Originally published in the Sunday, September 4th, 2022 edition of the Stabroek News Sometimes the perfect book just happens to find you, ticking all the boxes you want for a review even before you knew those boxes needed to be ticked. I have been hearing the name Darcie Little Badger floating around the literary landscape …
Sisterhoods and motherhoods are complicated affairs, filled with love and joy as well as chaos and betrayals. The Mothers by Brit Bennett is a book that shows these complex relationships by following the lives of three young African Americans and exploring how their connections with their mothers – biological, adoptive, or just the elderly church …
Continue reading Love, Shame and Betrayal in Brit Bennett’s The Mothers
Originally published in the Sunday, June 5th, 2022 edition of the Stabroek News Dear reader,The review below doesn’t fully capture just how much Patsy affected me as a reader. From the first line, I was punted back to my childhood, to the moment that I, too, stood in the American Embassy line waiting to go …
Continue reading Queer Immigrant Realities showcased in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy
April finds me in a mischievous mood, the joyful memories of Easters past working their way around my subconscious. It’s a season of quick laughter and a hunger for fun, which made me crave a book about tricksters and mischief-makers, and the chaotic energy they radiate. For this reason, I am returning to the first …
Continue reading Chaos is Power in Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
- originally published in the January 23,2022 edition of the Stabroek News I was introduced to Elizabeth Acevedo back in 2020 when I read “Gilded”, her contribution to the short story anthology A Phoenix First Must Burn. Her tale about a young Taino metalmancer starting a revolution in the colonised Dominican Republic was one of my …
Continue reading A teen mother triumphs in Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High
-- Originally published on December 12, 2021 in the Stabroek News Last December, I had the pleasure of reviewing a gift: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko, which sits on my bookshelf as one of the best books I have ever read, and I was happy to share it with my readers last year. Thankfully, Ifueko herself …
Continue reading Behold the Saviour Empress in Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko
-- Originally published on November 14, 2021 in the Stabroek News Photograph of Premee Mohamed I love cosmic horror. There is something unsettling about one day finding one’s self battling against giant incomprehensible forces older than humanity itself. Add a dash of action/adventure to the mix and set it in the early 2000s and I …
Continue reading The triumphs and woes of genius in Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising
I was drawn to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by a Guardian Article in 2016 when the publication announced that Arundhati Roy was breaking her 20-year fiction hiatus and publishing a second novel. I was intrigued. I had come across Roy’s work near the beginning of my original reading challenge when I got a kindle sample …
Continue reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Because of my bad habit of stereotyping romance novels, I had no intention of ever reading Me Before You mainly because of my bad habit of stereotyping romance books. I know, I know. One should not judge a book by its genre, but romance has always seemed too overdramatic to me. For the most part, I …
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